Young Writers Society

Paul 3:30 am - Day 2

He had failed, he sat alone on sofa, he couldn't keep up pretense of marriage anymore. He hated Ceilia, he hated her for what she'd done, a young teenager had bested him, and then gave him best thing of his life. Now. Now there was nothing. A lie is a beautiful thing when a beautiful thing is given back. No one knew. No one knew of his past or how a little girl had got him in bed.

She wasn't coming back, and he was going to kill Sienna, going to kill Gatlin, kill them all. They took Sofie, they took his little gem.

The wind blowing through the house caused no shiver for Paul. Didn't make him feel anything. At this point he felt nothing. At this point he was totally alone, Samara was gone. Ceilia was in bed weeping. Let the bitch weep, he thought. Sofie was everything to him, she had defiled him and given Sofie, but he hated her.

Paul was going through motions.

With a loud sigh, he closed his eyes and wept.

Sofie was gone.

They all should suffer.

"The Spoils of War"



Gatlin Nash | "The Pit" | Day 26, 2:20 PM

"I-I swear..."

The guard stepped forward, with the loaded needle-gun, prepared to pierce Gatlin's heart if given the command. There were three men in the cell; Gatlin and two guards. And the first one put the gun down and grabbed a rope, thrusting the bleeding man against the wall as he tied the noose around his neck. Gatlin gagged and spat out watered-down blood, his gut retching from the beating.

The second guard hoisted up the noose in the lamp-lit room and brought Gatlin up to his toes, just low enough not to kill him. His gags and gasps mixed together, some dark and esoteric tongue long forgotten by the merciless.

The guards picked their weapons and stared at the heap of exposed, scarred flesh in front of them. For more than three weeks, the fool had pleaded innocence; and for three weeks, he had been beaten to within an inch of his life.

"One last chance, Nash."

The poor soul hung there, nearly trying to die. He coughed violently and gagged until a bloody vial spewed from his gullet. The guards chuckled and one took the first strike against his back with a studded club. The hangman jerked to one side, but stayed silent in his slaughterhouse.

The second guard reared back and swiped at Gatlin's face with a cat of nine tails, cleaving a chunk of meat from his bones. His thin blood fell like rain onto the thirsty floor. The strike, so severe that it cut the rope hanging him, left him numb on his left side.

And there, in the midst of his indignity and suffering, the guards spat on him, taking him by the throat to his cell, dragging his pathetic, bloody shell across the stone floors where smellingsalts had been thrown to cut the edge of the putrid vomit. The salt clung to his open flesh and burned into his bones.

The guards dropped him into his dirt-floored cell by his neck and shut the steel door, caging him inside. Only his gags and coughs and moans left his parched lips.

And there he lay, a victim of his own justification, damned by the lunacy of a scorned man.

And Gatlin, the invincible man with nothing but courage and gall, began to cry. For hours, he let his sobs and moans fill the lower chambers, harmonized by his own gloom and suffering for hours until he heard footsteps on the stone floors. Footsteps that approached his cell, of course, for another interrogation...

Though, it wasn't the next day. It couldn't have been. Gatlin turned his bloody, naked half-corpse over on the dirt floor and squinted his eyes to see the blood-coated image ahead of him. Maybe he...she... Maybe the entity came to mock him, to spit on him and call him an abomination who warranted death in the blackness of the vile he called a soul.

But the voice behind the enigma spoke and, for the first time in weeks, the sting of the steady wounds subsided for his focus on words...and merely words without threat. But who, he wondered. Who?

And the voice spoke: "What are you afraid of?"

Gatlin merely lay motionless, craving for the mercy of a man of God.

And the voice spoke again, saying, "Wait longer, martyr, for mercy is the collateral of war, and if you justify your wager, then you must sacrifice your soul to survive."

His eyes closed, his heartbeat slowing under the coaxing of the silken voice. Perhaps it wasn't a man of God he sought after; perhaps this was a God of man.

And once more, the voice spoke, as if in his ear, saying, "Peace comes on the horizon of victory; be strong of heart and endure."

But it was like it was another forgotten language that didn't fit into his ears; rather, the voice spoke to his soul, easing the blistered and skinned flesh.

In the voice, there was survival. And hope.

But the survival had to wait out until morning.

Suddenly, the sound of the enigma's breathing vanished, replaced by the sound of faraway voices arguing over the directives of the leader, Paul.

In this new, broken, religious Gatlin's soul, Paul was twisted and encrypted with the most wicked and vile of codex.

Satan, it registered.

Paul is Satan and must be destroyed.

Sienna Afton - Prison Cell, Day 26, 5:49 PM

They inked bruises on her skin everyday. Once or twice an ankle was sprained, a wound inflicted. Occasionally hunger took her consciousness away. That Paul...Haha. There was nothing he wouldn't do. Starvation, dehydration, torture. It didn't matter. His precious little Sofie was the most important thing of all.

But damned if she was going to give up.

In the deafeningly eerie silence Sienna laughed to herself, tilting her head back against the cold stone wall of her prison. Dirt coated her fingers and her clothes were in tatters. A face streaked with tears smiled at the small window on the opposite wall. No time for vanity today, or tomorrow, or for the rest of her life. It was the goddamned end of the world, after all.

That idiot Paul had effectively damned them all. He'd destroyed her research in front of her eyes, saying that it was all useless. Useless? Useless??? She would show him useless. His corpse, his bloodied corpse, was going to be useless. She may not have her samples anymore, but she still remembered a few of her notes. It took nights, no days, of trying to remember, but she did. Those notes came back to her bit by bit and she could almost remember everything now. Almost. But what she knew was enough. And when she got her hands on the things she needed, she was going right back to work.

There was a knock on the door. "Anytime you're ready Sienna."

"Go fuck yourself," she shrieked, laughing at her own presumed cleverness afterwards.

Today she was going to try and run again. Maybe she'd fail, like every other time she tried to run away. Or maybe she wouldn't, because this time she was pretty sure of herself. Every time she failed, she'd taken note of where she screwed up and where the guards stumbled.

Sunset. When Paul allowed the guards to take a few minutes off their shift, taking over for them and taunting her while he did so.

Well, Sienna baby, it was time to get your ass off the floor and out of this forsaken dump. Sometimes she wished a raptor would simply eat her, and she knew that possibility wasn't far off. With the children still gone and the dinosaur roars getting terrifyingly close, she knew what was going on.

Those children were being turned into nightmarish humanoids.

"Sienna, I can kill you anytime I want to."

Sienna slunk towards the door, pressing her face to its rough surface. "But you won't," she whispered, softly so he would know that she was right behind the door.

"Don't push it."

"You won't because I know where your little girl is and I'm the only hope you have of finding her. But you know what? I'll never tell. Still...that won't make you kill me because you, being the pathetically hopeless bitch you are, keep hoping I'm going to give in." She intentionally sounded gleeful. It provoked a response all right.

Paul opened the door, roaring. "THAT'S IT -"

Sienna was ready for him. Asher taught her how to fight. She aimed for his eyes, throat and knees, clawing, kicking, punching, hitting as hard as she could. Her hands closed in on the gun in his hands. One more kick to the solar plexus and he released his grip. Sienna finished the bastard off with a hit to the back of his neck, and he fell to the floor in a battered heap.

The great thing about Paul was that he could be so stupidly blind when he was mad.

Sienna shook her head and scrambled out of her cell, desperately praying that those guards hadn't finished their break yet. She ran forward with no precise destination in mind, crashing through any obstacle in her way.

Voices from the hallway to her right drifted to her, followed by the sound clinking bottles. Sienna dove for a steel door and fumbled with the lock. She picked it with the help of a hairpin that had clung to her hair despite all the torture session.

It slammed shut as soon as she was inside. Sienna breathed heavily, unmindful of the heavy stench of blood and sweat hanging in the air. The air here was thick, unlike the one in her own cell, and it was stale. Florescent lights lit up the chamber, and nothing natural seemed to exist here.

A bloodied body lay on the floor, making her heart skip several beats. Oh God. Drake? Was that Drake?

The body spluttered and struggled to look at her. Sienna didn't dare drop the gun she held, but she ran to the body and knelt by his side. He lay on the floor, face down on the grimy red floor.

"Drake?" She didn't know how to move him to see his face. Every part of him seemed to bleed, and moving him could cause more injuries. A few wounds were already infected and when she touched him he was feverish.

Paul was such a bastard.

"Drake, we'll get you out of here."

He moaned and Sienna choked back a sob. If she could put a bullet in Paul's head, she'd die happy. It wouldn't be long before the guards found Paul's battered body. She had to move quick, and she definitely couldn't leave Drake here.

Sienna began to move him, gritting her teeth and begging his God to give him strength, because she could never drag him out of this base alive.

It was only when she'd gotten him to a sitting position that she realized it wasn't Drake but that infuriating guard who called her Fox she'd found. Sienna almost dropped him to the floor again, but that nagging voice in her head told her not to.

You can't leave him here. Asher would die again if he knew you were capable of leaving a dying man to rot just because he wasn't Drake.

Sienna bit her lower lip. Her conscience was right. She would just have to find a way to drag this stupid half-dead guard out with her.

Ceilia 3:30am, Day 2

Ceilia held back a large grin, forcing tears out instead. She had destroyed Paul's sanity - the little he had. With one smooth sweep-like action, Ceilia moved off the bed and grabbed a backpack she had prepared awhile back.

I didn't expect to use it this soon though.

She admitted to herself, slinging it lazily over one shoulder. Ceilia had already changed out of the dress and into jeans and a basic black t-shirt. She slid her shoes on before walking into the small living room, where Paul sat. She walked to the door that led outside before stopping and turning to Paul, a somewhat sly smile on her now-dyed face.

“I was successful. It's over for you, Sofie is gone. She was nothing. She meant nothing to me – she was just your's. And now that I think of it, she was a couple things. Sofie was just like you. Pathetic and a coward; she wouldn't have survived what she had coming anyways.” Her words tumbled out, almost like a growl before she turned back to the door, turning the handle to free herself once again.

Gatlin Nash - Prison Cell, Day 26, 6:00 PM

Was the voice back?

Arms pulled him off the ground, but into a hug...and then they let him drop again.

Gatlin groaned, his rancid flesh stinging with fresh infection. "Pls..." he tried to speak, flicking the arid consonants through his parched lips. "Hhhp mh..."

The ghostly arms just gathered him back against her. She pressed her hand against his mouth and his eyes fell shut, giving way to the darkened silence around them. But she was right in her shushing. Outside the cell door, guards were talking to one another, laughing at something from the outside world.

The woman, who he had realized was a woman after feeling her breasts against his cheek, pressed the back of a gun against his raw chest and kept their breathing steady until the guards moved on. She moved Gatlin into the one shaft of light in the room, checking his face for consciousness. "Can you walk?" she asked, holding him up by his shoulders.

Gatlin just slumped and fought for enough strength to nod.

So the woman pulled open his cell door, blinding him with the light of the hallway. She pulled up on his shoulders and he staggered alongside her until they encountered more roaming voices. She shoved Gatlin into a side hallway, covering him in the corner as the guards passed. He groaned softly, losing his strength against the wall. He closed his eyes again and tried to detach himself from the pain and all that was around him.

But that was impossible. She still had the gun pressed up against his chest, and he realized what he had to do.

And it took a religious strength to push her aside.

The broken man stole the gun and swung away from her, releasing boiling tears onto the bloody floor. And, as he closed his eyes again, he swallowed up his pain into the voice in his soul, cast off to meet his father in hell.

Paul – His House – Day 26: 5:30pm

It came as no surprise to Paul that Gatlin was dead, and he felt nothing, no anger no sadness. Nothing was the same Ceilia deception would be seen to, and he would find Sofie and leave this place. Everything would be made okay.

At the corner of his eye he saw a few sheets of Sienna’s work still existed, must have not grabbed them at the time.

It was all jargon except for one paragraph which stated explicitly, ‘The San Diego Institute would be ideal for the test to be done, my main problem is fact that it’s known that they were working on more than Dinosaurs there...’

The door burst open.

Turning slowly he smiled, a evil vengeful smile, “Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly.”

It was Ceilia.

“That’s right, beat me when I’m down. It won’t bring back Sofie, you sadistic bastard!”

He smirked, “Why Ceilia, didn’t know you were so kinky, but if it’s what you wish.” He chuckled.

Her eyes turned to fear, but still she replied, “I raped you. I doubt you can do worse.”

Pauls eyes lit up with glee, “You shall see, did you know Gatlin dead, soon Sienna will be too, so just think what I shall do to person like you?”

"Spare me the bore of your rant."

Grinning he dimmed the lights picking up the poker, “Ceilia, prepare to have your body wracked with pain.”

Samara|The Church-Day 26; 5:42pm:

The church was a place of sorrow today. Sorrow and death-always death. The old organ was still collapsed--no one had seen fit to remove the man beneath it yet. The place stank, but I wasn't complaining.

The tunnels... What the hell had happened down there? One minute we had the kids-all of them-and the next we'd been separated and Gatlin and I had stumbled out into the sunlight.

I wiped more tears away and closed my eyes. Why did we have to lose the kids? Why? And Paul had gone mad. Gatlin hadn't done anything. Hell, I hadn't done anything either. And that was our problem. We hadn't done anything to save the kids when we'd lost them.

My eyes flew open and I shot to my feet. That was it! Paul had to be told the truth. He had to see the senselessness in what he was doing! Then again, he was crazy...

No. I'd make him see the stupidity of this, make him see how insane he'd gone. I mean, everyone was scared of him.... But I knew better. He was just a scared old man who'd lost his reason to live-his Sofie.

Wiping away the remaining tears, I left the church and took off at a trot towards Paul's house. He'd be there; he was always there nowadays. There or below, in the prison section.

I winced, thinking of Gatlin down in one of those stinky cells. Paul had to wake up. I wasn't sure if he could now. It'd been too long. Neither of us were sleepy well, or eating well.

Someone was screaming when I reached Paul's house-and I could only guess that it was Ceilia. Damnit. He just had to go and torture her, didn't he?

"Hey!" I yelled, pushing open the door.

Paul had Ceilia on the ground and he was hitting her. Over and over again. With a damn poker. I gasped, covering my mouth with both hands. What the hell? Why was he doing that?

"PAUL!" I screamed and he paused, looking towards me. "Stop, goddamnit. Stop." He turned back to Ceilia and raised the poker again. "STOP!" Paul hesitated--and then he brought the metal down again. "Whoa, stop! She never did anything to you!"

Paul frowned at me. "Never did anything to me?" he asked, glaring.

I didn't dare move while I had his attention. "You love her, remember?" He shook his head, raising the poker again.

"No, I don't," he hissed.

Just then Ceilia managed to prop herself up. She looked at me and then at Paul. "I raped him," she snarled and Paul paled. Obviously no one had heard this before. "I forced him into this marriage..." She choked off the words with horrible wracking cough. I don't think it was real-probably faked.

I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. Ceilia....raped Paul?